History's Eye

Lagos State Deputy Governor, Dr Idiat Adebule (right) with the Deputy Managing Director, Total Exploration & Production Nigeria Limited, Mr. Charles Ngoka (left) during the Official handing over of 2,400 Life Jackets donated by Total Nigeria Plc. to the Lagos State Government  at the Lagos House, Ikeja on Wednesday as a way of contributing to the prevention of boat mishaps on  water ways.

obbi Kristina Brown lost her six month battle to live last night after she was found unresponsive in her bath tub at home. Family sources now say that the 22-year-old will be laid to rest in New Jersey, next to her beloved mother Whitney Houston.  Her body will be flown to New Jersey following a funeral service in Atlanta so she can be laid to rest alongside the singer. Whitney Houston died in February 2012 and was buried at Fairview Cemetery in Westfield, New Jersey next to her late father, John Russell Houston who died in 2003 following a long battle with diabetes and heart disease. Bobbi was 18 at the time of her mum’s death and was left devastated. Soon after Whitney’s death, the teenager suffered a hysterical breakdown and was sedated in hospital. She was latterly treated for severe stress and anxiety. More recently though, she was depressed and was at times suicidal, according to her cousin, Jerod Brown. In eerily similar circumstances, Whitney was found dead in a b...

Believe it or not, the villagers of Hokse, Nepal, are so poor that they’re forced to sell their own organs in order to make ends meet. The practice is so common there that the place has been nicknamed ‘Kidney Village’. Organ brokers regularly visit the village and its surrounding areas and convince cash-strapped locals to part with one of their healthy kidneys. These agents are notorious for tricking innocent villagers into traveling to Southern India to have their operations. They cook up all sorts of tales, telling the poor villagers that humans only need one kidney for survival or that the organ, once removed, will grow back! That particular trick was used to fool Geetha, a mother-of-four who sold her kidney for only $2,000. “For ten years people came to our village trying to convince us to sell our kidneys but I always said no,” Geetha said. But as her family grew, her desire to provide them with a house got stronger. “I have always wanted my own house and a piece of land,...

Nigel Richards is a beast when it comes to the game of Scrabble. He’s so good that he recently won the French Language Scrabble Championship without even speaking the language. ‘ “He doesn’t speak any French at all – he just learned the words,” Nigel’s friend Liz Fagerlund told the media. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French, I wouldn’t think.” No wonder they call him the ‘Tiger Woods of Scrabble’. French journalist and self-confessed Scrabble lover Jean-Baptiste Morel wrote: “He doesn’t speak French, but he learned to play in our language by reading the words of the ODS (Official Scrabble Book) as if it were a sequence of letters to learn. The man, as well as having a perfect command of the vocabulary, possesses an impressive game tactic that allows him to leapfrog the competition.” Morel added that Richard had managed to win in spite of a “pretty rotten” draw of letters.

Chinese surgeons recently performed a bizarre surgery in order to save a man’s severed hand. They grafted it on to his ankle for a month, before reattaching it to his arm! The innovative surgery was carried out on factory worker Zhou, from Changsha, China’s Hunan province. Zhou’s left hand was accidentally severed from his arm during an accident involving a spinning blade machine. He was immediately rushed to Xiangya Hospital, where Dr. Tang Juyu and his team realised that the damaged nerves and tendons needed time to heal. If they tried to attach the hand to his arm immediately, its cells would die from lack of blood supply. “Under normal temperatures, a severed finger needs to resume blood supply within 10 hours, but that time is even shorter for a separated limb,” Tang explained. “If a limb is short of blood for too long, its tissues die and it will be unsalvageable.”